Reviews & Analysis

Politicians and law enforcement officials have advocated the militarization of local law enforcement on the grounds that it promotes public and officer safety, and some early research seemingly supported those claims. Two new studies reveal limitations in the data used in this prior work. When these issues are addressed, evidence for the benefits of militarization largely vanishes.

Horien and colleagues provide a roadmap to working with large, publically available imaging datasets.

Winterton et al. review the status and challenges of intranasal oxytocin research and argue that only a combination of theory, methodology and replicability will achieve a successful reorganisation of intranasal oxytocin research.

How can we determine the best way of measuring a psychological construct? Bach et al. propose a ‘retrodictive validity’ approach, in which candidate methods are ranked based on their sensitivity to detect known effects, with the most sensitive then being favoured for use in novel scenarios.

A study in Nature Human Behaviour proposes a biologically plausible algorithm producing near-optimal behaviour in uncertain and volatile environments through computational imprecision. A complementary study in the same issue shows that, depending on context, uncertainty itself guides different decisions and is differentially represented in the brain.

Dubois and colleagues describe how a testable framework for personality research, delineating personality’s causal and constitutive relations with genes, environment, brain, mind and behaviour will benefit the field.

From aardvark to zyzzyva, the world we live in is rich and complex. How is this diversity of objects represented in the human mind? Through an experimental and computational tour de force, Hebart et al. show that people share a mental representation of objects based on a small number of meaningful dimensions.

Perceptions of numerosity, duration and distance play fundamental roles in our behaviour and in our thinking, but how we perceive these abstract quantities is a mystery. Cheyette and Piantadosi provide a model that explains both new and long-standing experimental results on the accuracy and speed with which human subjects report the numerosity of a visible set.

Probabilistic mixture models have contributed significantly to advancements in visual working memory research in recent decades. In a new paper, Schurgin and colleagues revisit the basic assumptions of mixture models and suggest that we cannot understand memory without first considering perception.

Giurge and Whillans et al. highlight the problem of time poverty, explore the factors that drive it, discuss its personal and social consequences, and call for more research attention to this pervasive form of poverty.

Electrical stimulation of the human cortex, undertaken for brain surgery, triggers percepts and feelings. A new study documents an ordering principle to these effects: the farther removed from sensory input or motor output structures, the less likely it is that a region contributes to consciousness.

Thirty-two experts propose ten considerations for managing the de-escalation of COVID-19 containment measures while still maintaining public adherence to social and physical distancing.

Stroke can lead to debilitating consequences, including loss of language. An important goal of stroke research is to use machine learning to predict outcomes and response to therapy. A new study compares different approaches to predicting post-stroke outcomes and highlights the need for systematic optimization and validation to ultimately translate scientific insights to clinical settings.

Lorenz-Spreen et al. argue that effective web governance is needed to empower individuals online. They describe two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that can help redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice

Human culture is unique. Or is it? A new study reveals unexpected cultural diversity in the fine-grained details of chimpanzee termite fishing behaviour. These novel findings shed light on the richness of chimpanzee cultural diversity and reveal a narrower gap between the cultures of humans and other apes.

Leroi et al. argue that neutral models, which are evolutionary models that do not involve a process of natural selection, must be applied with care, and that alternative methods are often needed to conclusively explain the diversity of variants.

Harden and Koellinger discuss the goals, methods and challenges of social science genetics, which aims to unravel the genetic underpinnings of individual differences in social, behavioural and health outcomes.

Behaviour change is crucial to preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the absence of pharmaceutical interventions. West et al. argue that we urgently need effective interventions to increase adherence to personal protective behaviours.

How do we effectively process the information arriving to our senses to make adaptive decisions and behave appropriately, and which brain areas are responsible? A new study combines multimodal noninvasive neuroimaging in humans to reveal the anatomical locus of efficient sensory evidence accumulation.

Forty-three experts highlight some key insights from the social and behavioural sciences for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and point out important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.